If Brexit Britain wants Europe to listen, it must learn to speak European | Timothy Garton Ash

Article 50 could easily be extended for three months, but that’s not enough. Time to look beyond the Westminster bubble

An old New Yorker cartoon shows a middle-aged man at a drinks party saying to another: “But that’s enough about you, let’s talk about me!” This is Brexit Britain talking to the rest of Europe. To be sure, all nations are obsessed with their own affairs. A Polish joke has it that the entry for elephant in the encyclopedia reads “the elephant and the Polish question”. But most European countries have at least some accompanying sensitivity to what is going on around them.

I wonder how many people in Westminster this week even knew that the leaders of France and Germany were signing a new treaty of cooperation in Aachen; that the French president, Emmanuel Macron, deeply shaken by the level of support for the gilets jaunes protests, had launched a “national debate”, much like the one being called for in Britain; that Poland had been shaken by the senseless murder of the liberal, pro-European mayor of Gdańsk, Paweł Adamowicz, in an atmosphere of partisan conflict so bitter that the nation could not even unite in the face of such tragedy. Reflecting all this turmoil, the whole continent is gearing up for European elections in May which will be a battle royal between two fundamentally different visions of the European future – a conservative, nationalist one spearheaded by the Hungarian Viktor Orbán and the Italian Matteo Salvini, and a more liberal, internationalist one represented by the much weakened Aachen duo of Macron and Angela Merkel. Orbán and Salvini don’t intend to leave the EU, they intend to run it. So it’s not just the future of the UK that will be decided this year, it’s also the future of Europe.

Related: May under increasing pressure to delay Brexit as union leaders call for article 50 extension – Politics live

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